A year has subtly passed since the last entry to the journeybook. However, the travels have not left me. And sincerely hope they never will. This blog here will now also consist of all my travels. Wherever they take me.

Here we go. It was last year (in 2010), early spring vacation in France-Germany-Switzerland.

Thank you Ryanair for the 500 kroon tickets Riga > Frankfurt.
Winter was still ghosting Eesti, so minutes after reaching Strasbourg we felt the urge to have a picnic outside. Didn’t matter it was around 10C. Cheap wine and not so cheap strawberries from local groceries was all we needed.

Continued by early morning bicycle lessons in the roundabouts.

This is not one of these before and after pictures.
It is the my-bike-dies-and-i-will-leave-it-here-to-die-peacefully type of case.

Staying at Ines’s place. This street was our home street for few days. Mommy Ciconias calling daddy Ciconias. Just watch out for the splashes when walking the pavement.

What do you do when you go to a french jazz club and hava bunch of foreigners in your table. You start playing Muts Notsu - an ancient Estonian card game (or is it?). Something we have all played when we were at the age of 5 or so. Spreading the culture. yeah

Must start going to the clubs with bicycle back home also. It’s damn convenient. Not mentioning how much better cyclist you are on the late hours.

Alps. Here we come!

The plan was simple. We had a brand new rental Opel (literally 7 kilometers on the odometer) and take it from Germany to France, back to Germany, from there to Switzerland, then France again and finish in Frankfurt Airport, Germany. All that in 6 days. Easy!

Autobahns with our crappy engine - almost got the tear out.
Cheap fine wine from everywhere you go - good!
Quality turkish kebabs from every town - very good!
Estonian oat porridge in the mornings - almost as good as kebabs!
Small German towns with “lively nightlife” - need an improvement!
70 vol asian sake-likes (it was like sake) - can’t remember.
German bratwursts - a must have!
Iranian disco night - survived without any explosions.
Boys havin cold room and girls having nice warm room every night in Strassbourg - not cool.
Europapark and Europe’s fastest roller coasters - über cool!
Getting a speeding ticket and losing 50€ from credit card a week after trip - canceled the card
Going to central Europe again - for sure!

This is one before the last post in this blog. Or.. at least till my next journey.

Bangkok. Spent 4 days here. First day visiting the temple and learning local history. Next days passed in markets, shopping malls, more markets and visiting suit-maker.

Bangkok is full of contrast. It resembles a bit with KL, but people seem to be bit friendlier. You will find ultramodern city center with high-end fashion district, traffic jams, monorail etc etc. On the other hand you have these old school tuk-tuk drivers on the roads side by side with Lexuses and very old and dirty looking houses few hundred meters on on the opposite direction.

It is also a massive city (6-10 million people, nobody really knows ..or cares), so it’s hard to really understand this place with 4 days I had.

Bon apetit!

It’s okay to rest at noon when the temperature is around 40 and you feel like a beauty nap. Local park will do fine.

Even the dogs feel that way..

If you’re going to Chatuchak weekend market, picture like this is very common. If you see something you like, you wake up the guy. Or just take it and walk away

After 24 hours on the road I reached my destination Siem Reap - the home of Angkor Wat temples. I found this town to be my favorite one in Cambodia also (compared with Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville). It’s nice and cozy, it has awesome “Bar street” in the middle of the city with 0,5$ beers and lively nightlife, good markets and friendly people.

After arrival I hooked up with a tuk tuk driver who I hired for the next two days for draging me around into the temples, silk factory and just around the city. Cost me 12$ a day. Not bad.

The entire second day was spent in the Angkor Wat temples (listed as one of world’s wonders), which is massive. The architecture is astonishing. Most built around 13th century, these guys didn’t miss any details while carving the sculptures out of stone. If you reach there yourself, then you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

Day started around 5am. With monkeys in sunrise.

It was funny. Every day few hours after noon it started raining. Lasted an hour or two, and back to normal again.

Petrol station in cambodian way.

My tuktuk driver Sam! WHo was by the way very friendly and humble. I recommend him.

After 3 nights in Siem Reap took the night bus to the famous beach town Sihanoukville. I’d heard some good things about this place. As you can see yourself from the picture below.

Unfortunately I didn’t find this town to be much. Beach wasn’t very pretty, lots of dirt, too touristy, bad weather!

In here was probably my dodgiest place to spend the night. 3$ a night got me this cardboard shack (notice how the walls let through the light) with moskito nets around the beds cause. It was nice and cozy, that if you could not think about the possibly infected malaria moskitos flying inside at night.

And my last stop. Phnom Penh, the capital.

Airport, here I come. Off to Bangkok. To stack up my racksack with souvenirs, clothes and everything that can be bought with ridiculous price.

Thailand welcomed me with their ‘hospitality’ already in Phuket Airport. First I discovered that Estonia is for some reason left out from the list where you can get a 30 day visa for free and left you with a 15 day one time entry visa worth 30$. Secondly, as expected, the hassle starts already in the airport official counters where they insist me going on these expensive taxis and get a shity exchange rate for my money saying they have the best one. Having avoided all that, decided to sit down to the bench outside and started waiting for my bus to the city. Letting the real South-East Asia experience begin!

And here’s mr Escobar on the left again, who I met randomly on the street here. And Chris on the right.

But I can tell you this - you don’t wanna spend more than one night in that place!

Next day - the beaches (and sunburnes, again!). Followed by a trip through the whole peninsula with our hired motos.

So, as expected, Phuket was touristy and overcrowded in certain areas.

Next stop: Phi Phi islands. There’s a ferry going there. And of course you meet fellow travelers on it who become your companions for a few days or maybe more. There’s a great thing about these ‘friends’ you get. Although the time you spend together isn’t much, but maybe some day when you decide you want to visit South-Africa for example, you have a contact in Facebook who you have met somewhere on the road and who lives there and is kindly ready to show you around saving you the trouble of reading through few lonely planet’s chapters.

So this was our crew in Phi Phi.

I’d say this is a place for a perfect vacation in Thailand - Phi Phi islands. Go there!

This is Estonia!

After sunset, things start happening in the beach.

And there was a bar in these small narrow streets here called Reggae Bar. In the middle of it, there was a traditional Thai boxing arena. And as you can see, a guy with that poster.

So after an hour. Or two. After our drinks were close to finish, me and Andrew decided to get some free drinks in the reggae-bar-way:

And every night usually ends in beach here. Together with fireshows, music, good food and fine drinks.

This is the island, where The Beach was filmed. Unfortunately my camera got jammed for some reason and this is as close as I’m able to bring it to you this time. Luckily I got it working again in the evening.

About this ‘magical beach’. Can be way way over touristy as we experienced it - lots of people in really small strip of sand. But then again, half of us went there late afternoon with a ’storm approaching’ weather and they said it was completely blank and not a soul there. Must have been awesome. I can already imagine the dark stormclouds, windy ocean and the view from that beach..

Next stop: Krabi.

I didn’t find much else do here, but rock climbing. And I think I’ve found my new hobby! If only we had these rocks now here in Estonia also.

After 5 or 6 days, heading to Bangkok with a nightbus, to take regular bus to the Cambodia border to take a taxi to Siem Riep (read: 24hrs on the road)

Ceiling of my transport from Krabi to bus-station. Seems like this pickup truck has seen quite a fewbackpackers in its life..